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Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and twentieth-century world power. Silent film, Paula Cohen reveals, allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and answer the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. When film finally began to talk in 1927, the medium had already done its work. It had helped translate representation into a dynamic visual form and had "Americanized" the world. Cohen explores the way film emerged as an American medium through its synthesis of three basic elements: the body, the landscape, and the face. Nineteenth-century American culture had already charged these elements with meaning--the body through vaudeville and burlesque, landscape through landscape painting and moving panoramas, and the face through portrait photography. Integrating these popular forms, silent film also developed genres that showcased each of its basic elements: the body in comedy, the landscape in the western, and the face in melodrama. At the same time, it helped produce a new idea of character, embodied in the American movie star. Cohen's book offers a fascinating new perspective on American cultural history. It shows how nineteenth-century literature can be said to anticipate twentieth-century film--how Douglas Fairbanks was, in a sense, successor to Walt Whitman. And rather than condemning the culture of celebrity and consumption that early Hollywood helped inspire, the book highlights the creative and democratic features of the silent-film ethos. Just as notable, Cohen champions the concept of the "American myth" in the wake of recent attempts to discredit it. She maintains that American silent film helped consolidate and promote a myth of possibility and self-making that continues to dominate the public imagination and stands behind the best impulses of our contemporary world.
[...]... opposing strands of the American myth: individualism and democracy On the one hand, they extended concepts of physical self-reliance and resourcefulness associated with the American frontiersman and applied them to the material of personality On the other hand, their ability to shape themselves to the needs of their audiences reflected a new kind of public, consensual process in the creation of the self... rasa it once was, and it supported the myth even in the face of its own transformation, first, with the coming of sound and, later, with the advent of television and video In its dynamic integration of body, landscape, and face, film and its spinoffs have sustained the American myth and sold it to the world This is, I know, a controversial statement The American myth is no longer seen in the positive way... itself, silent film offered its audiences the opportunity to "see" the limits and omissions of its representations and, in time, to demand revision The esthetic and entertainment value of silent film may not be readily apparent to the uninitiated Most people think only of faded images and jerky movements when they think of the silent era, and it requires a certain amount of patience and attentiveness—not... independence of the birth of America from its European parent: "She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin And there is a general sloughing off of the old skin, towards a new youth It is the myth of America."6 The "shedding of the skin" that Lawrence associated with the American myth was, of course, the shedding of the trappings of European civilization and, in particular, the shedding of an inherited... history and its associations What, then, remains? "Man in the presence of Nature with his passions " (my emphasis) What remains, to translate this statement into images, are the body, the landscape, and the face, moving dynamically in combination These elements are at the center of any discussion of film as an American language They are the building blocks of the American myth, and their interaction... material and each of the three most important film operations: the cut, the long shot, and the close-up The cut was developed to enhance physical properties and bodily movement; the long shot, to render expansive and panoramic views of landscape; and the close-up, to register facial appearance and expressiveness In other words, it was to serve the elements of body, landscape, and face that the operations... he exists outside of his language and simply reads nature directly: "Better and wiser would it be," he declares in The Deerslayer, "if [man] could understand the signs of nature and take a lesson from the fowls of the air and the beasts of the fields."7 Bumppo, known by the Indians first as Deerslayer and then as Hawkeye, is the prototype from which all the heroes and heroines of American literature... for Emerson, it was the American continent itself that was "a poem"—"its ample geography dazzles the imagination." As the promoter of a new, indigenous form of expression, he counseled writers to turn away from Europe and study America— "the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government"—in short, to make the present facts of American life as important... between film and America as it would take shape during the silent era Although many countries contributed to the development of film technology and production at the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had emerged as the unrivaled center of world filmmaking by 1920 Several factors help account for this There was the influx of ambitious immigrants to American cities in the i88os and iSgos... first, The Pioneers, composed in 1823, deals with the settlement of the Hudson River Valley, occurring at the time that the novel was composed; the last, The Deerslayer, written in 1841, is set in the 17408, when the area was still in a state of wilderness The progression backward is important because it reflects the author's embrace of the American myth the conviction that the very newness of the country, . Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth